menu
close
DeakinCo.
Assessor Portal.
DeakinCo. a part of Deakin University is a local leader in workplace training and education. A cornerstone of their offering is Deakin Professional Practice credentials. These are a unique way of independently certifying and verifying existing workplace skills using recognised university assessment frameworks.
As the popularity of this offering grew, the organisation needed to find ways to improve the efficiency of delivering high-quality assessments without diminishing the academic rigour.
In my role as the Senior UX Designer in 2020, I collaborated closely with the Product Owner, the Professional Practice team, Assessors and the development team. Together, we undertook the significant project of completely rebuilding the Assessor Portal.
Outlined below is the strategic approach I led alongside the Product Owner:
For me, the joy in undertaking projects like this lies in delving deep into the details. Building a shared consensus of the project with stakeholders. Being clear on the approach, but remaining flexible. Ensuring time is allocated to proper research and testing, without causing UX bloat.
This project was a success because senior stakeholders had a clear problem; they needed to reduce the costs of delivering credentials. Improving the administration overhead, but also the fee per credential for each assessor.
Management understood the second part of the plan was risky, and so it was easy to convince them that we needed to demonstrate clear improvements and time savings in the process for assessors for them to be okay with the changes.
I took the time to understand the preferred workflows and the current key pain points for assessors; managing workloads, scheduling conversations with admins, missing evidence, confusing dashboards, manual rubric lookups. By loosely quantifying these overhead costs for assessors, and rationalising them against fee changes, thankfully I was able to see and explain which updates would result in the most time saving for assessors and use this to ensure these features were prioritised.
We unveiled a new dashboard that streamlined the workflow for assessors, allowing them to swiftly discern their responsibilities at a single glance. This uncluttered view facilitated easier prioritisation and management of their ad hoc assessments, which, while coming in sporadically, needed to be completed within a short set timeframe. This along with a clearer simpler notifications system, also reduced the need for administrators to follow up on assessment progress.
We restructured the way submissions were presented, improved submission quality checks, and made the way submissions were presented clearer and easier to understand. Additionally, we incorporated rubrics (assessment frameworks) into the platform, eliminating the administrative burden of having the right rubric on hand, along with the potential for human error from the process.
Furthermore, we alleviated the workload for administrative staff on several fronts. There were massive reductions in chasing assessors about deadlines; manual checks and manually-triggered actions were significantly reduced, all resulting in fewer touchpoints and reduced effort required for assessments to be managed. In the end, the improvements were delivered across all the key areas we had set out to address.
A systematic approach led to meaningful experience improvements and a vastly better-designed interface. And most importantly, significant savings to the cost of delivering credentials by ~35%.
